Sachs Lecturer Takes On the Christian Right

In
his final presentation, David C. Berliner, this academic year's Julius
and Rosa Sachs Lecturer, said the biggest problem with the Christian
Right is that "they eschew compromise because they are so sure they are
right."Berliner is Dean of the College of Education at Arizona State
University and is a Visiting Professor at TC. He explained that his
animosity is directed at fundamentalism, not any particular
denomination. In the United States, however, the fundamentalist group
that has the most visibility is the Christian Right, he said.

"In
general," Berliner continued, "the Christian Right argues that federal
controls have been used to deny students the ‘right' to pray in
schools; to restrict unfairly the teaching of ‘scientific creationism';
to encourage the appearance of ‘dirty,' ‘anti-family,'
‘pro-homosexual,' and ‘anti-American' books in school curricula; and to
enforce ‘cultural relativity' in courses on values and sex education."

One
Christian Right advocate, Robert Thoburn of the Fairfax (Virginia)
Christian School, said: "We believe public schools are
immoral."According to Berliner, Thoburn urges members of the Christian
Right to run for local school boards, saying that "Our goal is not to
make the schools better…The goal is to hamper them, so they cannot
grow… Our goal as God-fearing, uncompromised… Christians is to shut
down the public school, not in some revolutionary way, but step by
step, school by school, district by district."

Their strategy for
dismantling public education is to get themselves elected to school
boards, where they systematically handicap the system by voting against
tax increases, plans to reduce class size and raises for teachers, he
said.

Robert Simonds, head of the Citizens for Excellence in
Education (CEE), has written a guide for the future board members: How
to Elect Christians to Public Office. Berliner said that in the guide:
"Simonds advised his Christian candidates to be up-beat and avoid
saying things that could sound ‘kooky' and cause a backlash."

Berliner
said that the CEE takes credit for the election of 7,153 school board
members in 1993 and claims that by 1995 some 1,700 committees to
promote the election of Christians had been established within school
districts.

"The goal of many Christian school board members and
their constituents is to hamper the public schools so completely that
another 2 or 4 or 6 percent of the parents of public school children
will feel compelled to withdraw their children and enroll them in
private or religious schools," Berliner said. They want to increase the
enrollment in private schools to build public demand for vouchers, he
said.

Public school officials should take their efforts
seriously and should be respectful of their concerns, "some of which
are shared by all of us," he said. "But," he added, "we must also be
extraordinarily vigilant to prevent them from gaining control of the
public's common schools."